Instagram unveiled a sweeping overhaul on Tuesday to beef up privacy and limit social media’s intrusive effects for users who are younger than 18, as the app faces intensifying pressure over children’s safety online.

Instagram said the accounts of users younger than 18 will be made private by default in the coming weeks, which means that only followers approved by an account-holder may see their posts. The app, owned by Meta, also plans to stop notifications to minors from 10 pm to 7 am to promote sleep. In addition, Instagram will introduce more supervision tools for adults, including a feature that allows parents to see the accounts that their teenager recently messaged.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said the new settings and features were intended to address parents’ top concerns about their children online, including inappropriate contact, inappropriate content and too much screen time.

“We decided to focus on what parents think because they know better what’s appropriate for their children than any tech company, any private company, any senator or policymaker or staffer or regulator,” he said. Instagram’s new effort, called “Teen Accounts”, was designed to “essentially default” minors into age-appropriate experiences on the app, he said.

The changes are one of the most far-reaching set of measures undertaken by an app to address teenagers’ use of social media, as scrutiny over young people’s experiences online has ramped up. In recent years, parents and children’s groups have warned that Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and other apps have regularly exposed children and teenagers to bullying, paedophiles, sexual extortion and content promoting self-harm and eating disorders.

In June, Dr Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, called for cigarette-like labels on social media to warn of the potential mental health risks. And in July, the Senate passed bipartisan legislation called the Kids Online Safety Act to impose safety and privacy requirements for children and teenagers on social media.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has faced particular criticism over social media’s risks to young people. Dozens of state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against his company, accusing Meta — which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp — of knowingly hooking children on its apps while playing down the risks. At a Congressional hearing on child online safety in January, lawmakers urged Zuckerberg to apologise to families whose children had killed themselves after social media abuse.

“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Zuckerberg told the families.